Tag Archives: GMO labeling

Florida Bills To Label GMO’s

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Huge News: Florida Launches 3 Bills for Mandatory GMO Labeling!

Lend your support to the state!
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Christina Sarich
by Christina Sarich
Posted on January 21, 2016

Due to the efforts of thousands in a grassroots campaign, as well as the actions of Senator Maria Sachs and Representative Vasilinda who started a campaign 3 years ago, 3 GMO labeling bills are being put forth in Florida – Senate bills SB 1700 and SB 1708, and House bill HB 1369.

Polls report that ‘9 of 10’ people in the U.S. want to know what’s in their food, while 64 other countries already require GMO labeling. Yet we’re still struggling to achieve the right to know exactly what we’re consuming. With the DARK ACT and TTIP threatening food security and transparency, biotech giants like Monsanto and others in the biotech industry have been trying to keep everyone clueless about what’s in the food.

But as Vermont has proven, we can rise from the defeat of California’s Proposition 37 – a low point for the anti-GMO movement.

To support these bills, since we know that the biotech industry and organizations like the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association already have their henchmen trying to defeat them, consider calling to ask your Senator to co-sponsor SB 1700 and SB 1708 today!

You can say:

I am calling to request that Senator ___________ co-sponsor Senate Bill 1700 & 1708, the genetically engineered food labeling bill, introduced by Senator Sachs, because we have the right to know what’s in the food we feed our families.

If you don’t know what district you are in, search here.

Here is a brief overview of SB 1700, SB 1708, and HB 1369.

HB 1369: Labeling of Genetically Engineered Foods

“Labeling of Genetically Engineered Foods; Provides mandatory labeling requirements for genetically engineered raw foods & processed foods made with or derived from genetically engineered ingredients; directs DOH to adopt rules; provides for injunctive relief actions; requires court to award costs & fees under certain circumstances; specifies injunctive relief actions do not preclude civil actions for damages or personal injury.

SB 1700: Labeling of Genetically Engineered Foods

“Labeling of Genetically Engineered Foods; Providing mandatory labeling requirements for genetically engineered raw foods and processed foods made with or derived from genetically engineered ingredients by a specified date, etc.”

SB 1708: Labeling of Genetically Engineered Foods

“Labeling of Genetically Engineered Foods; Providing lists of raw agricultural commodities at high risk or potentially at risk for cultivation in a genetically engineered form; requiring the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to publish the lists by a specified date and to update a published list annually, etc.”

Campbell’s To Label GMO Ingredients

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Breaking: Campbell Soup to Adopt GMO Labels on its Products

Claims to support labeling standard for GMOs
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Mike Barrett
by Mike Barrett
Posted on January 8, 2016

In a move that will likely rock the mainstream, mega-food industry, Campbell Soup Company announced that it will work to become the first major food company to adopt food labels that will disclose genetically modified ingredients.

The decision by Campbell to attach a GMO label to its products is undoubtedly motivated by the continually-growing pressure from the people for food companies to engage in food transparency. Food providers such as Chipotle, Ben & Jerry’s, and even Hershey’s and General Mills have made moves to limit or eliminate genetically modified ingredients in at least some of their products – but never has going GMO-free been so mainstream and on a grand-scale.

Though the news isn’t completely out of the blue. In 2015, Campbell’s made several major announcements about improving the sustainability of its foods, including an aim to offer more non-GMO and organic foods.

The change in labeling is now expected to take 12 to 18 months.

The company stated:

“- Campbell’s will be launching several lines of organic kid’s soups, and removing MSG from all their kid’s soups.  In August 2015, the company will introduce Campbell’s Organic soup for kids in three chicken noodle varieties.  The soups will be non-GMO and certified Organic.

– Pepperidge Farm will be launching several organic wheat versions of their popular Goldfish Crackers.  Look for organic wheat versions of regular, cheddar, and parmesan in the coming year.  They still need to remove GMOs and go completely organic with the rest of their ingredients.

– Increasing organics across other food lines, and increasing the number of organic products offered by Plum.”

Read: 43% of Consumers Rank ‘Non-GMO’ as ‘Very Important’

It was a bit of a shock to those of us in the health food industry, as Campbell contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight GMO labeling efforts across the nation.

But based on recent interviews with Denise Morrison, chief executive of Campbell, it seems the company’s tune has changed (at least on the surface).

“We will withdraw from any coalition that doesn’t support mandatory labeling,” Ms. Morrison said. “We were involved in fighting the state ballots in California and Washington out of concern over a state-by-state patchwork, yet we didn’t participate in the fights in any other state beyond those. Any money we did spend after that was in support of seeking a federal solution.”

Adding to the news and probably most intriguing is the fact that Campbell is actually calling nationwide, uniform GMO labeling that would be mandatory.

“We’re optimistic that a federal solution can be reached in a reasonable amount of time, but if that’s not the case, we’re preparing to label all our products across the portfolio.

…We’ve always believed consumers have a right to know what’s in their food. We know that 92 percent of Americans support G.M.O. labeling, and transparency is a critical part of our purpose.”

About three-quarters of products made by Campbell (maker of brands like Pepperidge Farm, Prego, Plum Organics and V8 in addition to its namesake soups) – contain genetically modified ingredients from corn, canola, soybeans or sugar beets, the 4 most prevalent GMO crops.

This is a great win for the health food industry at large, as it shows a clear sign that our desire and demand for GMO labeling and food transparency is reaching new heights.

Additional Sources:

Winnipeg Free Press

USDA Introducing Non-GMO Label

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Huge Victory: USDA Introduces Official Non-GMO Label

Government to launch first non-GMO label
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Mike Barrett
by Mike Barrett
Posted on May 14, 2015

For years the public has been asking the U.S. government to institute mandatory labeling for any products containing genetically modified ingredients. Now, in response to the sounds of public outcry and vital activism, the United States Department of Agriculture is being forced to do something. The agency has developed a new government certification which companies can use to show that the product is completely free of GMOs.

Though the food advancement is arguably just tip-toeing around mandatory GMO labeling, it is definitely a sign that our government agencies are being forced to listen to our collective voice, and that they are really recognizing that there needs to be something in place that can clearly differentiate GMO-riddled and non-GM foods.

Currently, companies have the option to use either the non-profit Non-GMO Project’s verified seal, developed in 2007, or the USDA’s certified organic label. The difference with the newly-created USDA certification and these seals, however, is that the new seal is government-certified (the Non-GMO Project seal isn’t), and the USDA Organic seal comes with many more strict food rules than just being GMO-free. In other words, not all GMO-free foods are 100% organic.

“Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack outlined the department’s plan in a May 1 letter to employees, saying the certification was being done at the request of a “leading global company,” which he did not identify. A copy of the letter was obtained by The Associated Press.

…Vilsack said the USDA certification is being created through the department’s Agriculture Marketing Service, which works with interested companies to certify the accuracy of the claims they are making on food packages — think “humanely raised” or “no antibiotics ever.” Companies pay the Agricultural Marketing Service to verify a claim, and if approved, they can market the foods with the USDA process verified label.”

The new seal is voluntary, and companies would have to pay for it. The food products adopting the label would have a seal that says “USDA Process Verified” with a claim that it is free of GMOs.

“Recently, a leading global company asked AMS to help verify that the corn and soybeans it uses in its products are not genetically engineered so that the company could label the products as such,” Vilsack wrote in the letter. “AMS worked with the company to develop testing and verification processes to verify the non-GE claim.”

Vilsack said in the letter that the certification “will be announced soon, and other companies are already lining up to take advantage of this service.”

The downside of the USDA label is that it goes hand-in-hand with bills that are designed to block mandatory GMO labeling efforts across the country. A bill that was introduced last year provided the USDA cert, but wouldn’t make it mandatory – AND the bill would override any states laws that the citizens fought so hard for. An example can be seen with Vermont’s recent passing of a mandatory GMO labeling bill that will go into effect next year.

However, with the complications of a national food system, I see this seal as a victory. As long as the seal is attainable and doesn’t cost caring companies an exuberant amount of money to implement, it will be enough to clearly show which companies care enough to go GMO-free and which companies choose to use GMO ingredients.

Thanks to your vital activism and voice, the government is finally seeing that something needs to be done about GMOs in our food, and that is good news.

 

Napa Considering GMO Labeling

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County may be asked to vote on GMO labels

Advocacy group pushing for state/federal legislation
January 01, 2014 3:00 pm  •  PETER JENSEN

California voters rejected a ballot initiative that would label foods containing genetically modified organisms just over a year ago, but the issue continues to persist in Napa County.

The Napa County Local Food Advisory Council is preparing a recommendation to send to the Board of Supervisors supporting labeling such foods, Agricultural Commissioner Greg Clark said.

The recommendation is currently in draft form, but should reach the elected officials in the new year, Clark said. It would urge state and federal agencies and officials to support labeling, as they have the regulatory authority to impose that requirement.

The push locally proves that, despite a loss at the polls in November 2012, activists continue to press the issue. Proposition 37, which would have required the labeling, failed when it garnered 48.6 percent support, needing a simple majority to pass, according to the California Secretary of State’s Office.

Opponents of the initiative, which were well-funded by agricultural and industrial interests, outspent proponents $45 million to $6.7 million.

A subcommittee of the food council is working on the recommendation, Clark said, and is planning to bring it to the full council at its meeting in January.

With the council’s support, it would then move onto the Napa County Board of Supervisors. Clark was uncertain if it would need to go through the board’s legislative subcommittee, or if it could be put on the full board’s agenda for a discussion and potential vote.

Community members pressed local elected officials to take a stance on the issues, and retiring Agricultural Commissioner Dave Whitmer and Clark felt the food council was the appropriate place to debate it.

“The food council was the perfect entity to have that discussion,” Clark said.

The debate over GMOs fosters sharply different points of view on the health of foods containing GMOs, and the need to label them in the name of consumers’ rights. Clark acknowledged the challenge in keeping the debate solely on labeling and not debate health issues.

“Sometimes it’s a challenge to keep the focus on labeling,” Clark said. “There’s a tendency among people to passionately state their interest.”

Clark said the recommendation is careful to focus only on labeling, and not stray into the broader debate about GMOs.

“We’ve been very deliberate to say this is about labeling — just labeling,” Clark said.

from:    http://napavalleyregister.com/news/local/county-may-be-asked-to-vote-on-gmo-labels/article_68a7d3e4-726c-11e3-a3ff-001a4bcf887a.html

Grocery Manufacturers Attacking GMO Labeling

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GMO labeling to be outlawed? Grocery Manufacturers Association unveils deviously evil plan to silence us all

Friday, January 10, 2014
by Mike Adams,

(NaturalNews) The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) is scheming to criminalize state-by-state GMO labeling laws in a deviously evil effort to keep consumers ignorant of what they’re eating. Remember, the GMA is the same organization that got caught running an illegal money laundering scheme in Washington state, secretly funneling money from big food manufacturers into a campaign to defeat GMO labeling initiative I-522.

Now the GMA is pushing legislation at the federal level to not only outlaw GMO labeling laws at the state level, but also to get the FDA to declare GMOs as “natural” so that foods made with GMOs can claim “all natural” on their labels. A petition filed with the FDA by the GMA states, “GMA will be filing a Citizen Petition early in 2014 that asks the FDA to issue a regulation authorizing foods containing ingredients derived from biotechnology to be labeled ‘natural.'” (SOURCE)

“Monsanto and giant food companies are scheming behind the scenes to introduce a bill in Congress that would kill mandatory state GMO labeling efforts and replace it with a gutted version of a bill to preempt states’ rights and give the illusion of serious regulation,” reports Food Democracy Now, which also calls the plan “devious” in nature.

How evil can they get?

With these anti-transparency, anti-consumer, anti-American actions, the GMA now firmly puts itself in the same evil camp as Monsanto itself. Because the right to know what we are eating is a fundamental human right, the GMA’s actions clearly define it as an anti-human rights group. In the history of human rights violations, we’ve seen a long list of evil efforts to silence certain groups of people and keep them ignorant: Women were denied the right to vote, slaves were denied the right to “personhood,” and in the Holocaust, Jews were denied the right to life itself. Now the GMA joins that haunting history of human rights violators by insidious working to deny all people the right to know what they are eating.

The GMA solely represents the profit interests of dishonest, deceptive food manufacturers who sell toxic poisons, not the interests of food consumers, and it has a long established history of using deceptive tactics to make sure its members can continue to hide their toxic poisons in their food products.

The GMA is, in essence, a “pro-poison” industry group that wants consumers to unknowingly eat more poisons in their food. The GMA should not merely be ashamed of itself; it should be publicly exposed as an evil food industry group whose actions, if successful, may result in hundreds of millions of Americans being harmed by unknowingly eating unlabeled poisons in their food.

Your help is needed to stop this group from achieving its truly evil aims in Washington. Here’s what you can do to help:

Actions items to defeat the evil GMA

Sign this petition at Food Democracy Now:
http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/stop…

Share this story at the Center For Food Safety:
http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/press-rel…

Share this story right here on Natural News:
http://www.naturalnews.com/043469_GMA_GMO_la…

Tweet this story, Facebook it, email it, share in whatever way you can. The GMA needs to be halted by a barrage of active consumers who rise up and shout, “ENOUGH! We demand to know whether the products we buy contain GMOs!”

After all, the right to know what we eat is a fundamental human right. Don’t let the anti-human rights “GMA” group keep you in the dark over what you’re eating. We must not let evil prevail in this fight for food transparency!

BTW, Natural News Labs is the only organization in the world now testing and openly publishing heavy metals test results for foods made by the members of the GMA. To see those results right now, visit: http://labs.naturalnews.com

Sources for this story include

http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/files/201…
https://www.politicopro.com/story/agriculture/?id=29…
http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/press-rel…
http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/stop…

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/043469_GMA_GMO_labeling_evil_plan.html#ixzz2qFQjvpvw

GMO Labeling, Farm Bill, Monsanto

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GMO

How the Farm Bill could undermine the future of GMO labeling by individual states

Friday, June 21, 2013 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer

(NaturalNews) The Republicrats in the U.S. Congress have once again betrayed their constituents by voting down an amendment to the upcoming Farm Bill that would have openly recognized the right of individual states to choose whether or not to label genetically-modified organisms (GMOs). And even though the federal government does not actually have the power to regulate the labeling decisions of individual states, the failure of Senate Amendment 965 to garner enough support could end up undermining future GMO labeling initiatives.

As reported by Katherine Paul over at OrganicConsumers.org, the Senate on May 23 voted down S.AMDT.965, also known as the Sanders Amendment, in a vote of 27-71, effectively killing what would have been recognition at the federal level that individual states already have the right to mandate the proper labeling of foods, beverages, and other edible products that contain GMOs. Each individual state already has the right under the U.S. Constitution to label GMOs if they so choose, regardless of the amendment’s passage, but S.AMDT.965 would have expressly acknowledged this to avoid confusion.

But with typical food industry pandering, a majority of state Senators rejected the amendment, which leaves the future of GMO food labeling hanging in the balance. States still have the right to pass GMO labeling laws in accordance with the Constitution, of course. But the rejection of S.AMDT.965 creates the illusion that this is somehow not the case, as language in the amendment presupposes that states need some kind of magical “permit” from the federal government in order to pass GMO labeling legislation, a permit that will now not be granted.

Federal government has no legal authority to block states from passing GMO labeling legislation

No such permit exists, however. In fact, the federal government has absolutely no jurisdiction over individual states as it pertains to GMO labeling, as the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution expressly reserves all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government to the individual states and the people. In other words, the federal government itself does not have the necessary “permit” to offer any input into the matter whatsoever – the individual states are free to decide for themselves how to handle the GMO labeling issue without federal government interference.

“The 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution firmly establishes states’ rights and many states represented by members of the House Agriculture Committee use their state sovereignty to enact laws that protect their citizens from invasive pests, livestock diseases, maintain quality standards for dairy products, ensure food safety and unadulterated seed products,” said Representative Jeff Denham (R-Ca.) recently in regards to the so-called “King Amendment,” an ominous Farm Bill rider that specifically seeks to strip individual states of their ability to regulate food and other consumer goods.

“The biotech industry knows that it’s only a matter of time before Washington State, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut and other states pass GMO labeling laws,” adds Ronnie Cummins, National Director for the Organic Consumers Association (OCA). “Rather than fight this battle in every state, Monsanto is trying to manipulate Congress to pass a Farm Bill that will wipe out citizens’ rights to state laws intended to protect their health and safety.”